And still he had not found Illya. He knew he had not been mistaken about the sound of the heavy firing he had heard—it had been an U.N.C.L.E. Special. Then Illya had to be here, unless they, some enemy, had taken their dead and wounded, and Illya, with them!
Solo was feeling far from happy with this thought; then he looked inside the armored truck. Illya lay face down on the bags of money, his U.N.C.L.E. Special still gripped in his hand.
With a sinking in his stomach, Solo leaped into the truck and bent over his friend. The small Russian did not move. Solo felt his friend's body. Illya was very much alive. Solo could see no signs of a wound or an injury of any kind. Like the guards outside, Illya appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
But Solo checked the Special in the blond Russian's hand. The clip was empty, the barrel still hot to the touch. Solo squatted on his heels in the silent truck and rubbed his jaw. What the devil had Illya been firing at?
In the silence of the dark night Solo felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. There was something very strange, even weird, here on a deserted California back highway. Something connected to a Cult of strange, crippled, shaggy-haired men who worshiped some distant future.
Closer, but still far away, the approaching siren wailed like some disembodied banshee in the night. Solo opened his small attache case and took out a hypodermic needle.
His eyes studied the silent form of his friend. Then he selected a tiny ampoule from the case, snapped it into the case of the syringe, worked the plunger once, and injected the solution into the arm of the unconscious Illya.
Illya groaned, moved. Solo replaced the hypodermic in his case and waited. Illya groaned again, and suddenly came awake. The blond agent leaped up, crouched, his Special aimed and ready. He saw Solo.
"Quick, Napoleon! They're all around us! Cover the left!" Illya cried.
Solo watched the excited Slavic face of his partner.
"It's Thrush! We should have known! They—." Illya said quickly and then stopped suddenly.
Illya blinked his eyes and looked out through the rear door of the truck at the deserted highway in the dark night. Then he turned to Solo.
"Did I kill them all?" Illya said.
"All who?" Solo said slowly.
"There's nothing out there except the guards, Illya"
"Don't be stupid! I saw at least six go down. I— What happened to me? I wasn't hit? I—"
"You just passed out. Your clip was empty, but there are no bodies out there, not even any blood. ÄAs far as I can tell, Illya, there never were any enemies out there."
"But I saw them, Napoleon! At least ten Thrush agents. I saw their guns, their black uniforms, I even think I recognized two of them! I tell you I saw Thrush men attacking me!"
Solo nodded. "I'm sure you did, but they just weren't there, Illya. You were firing at nothing!"
Illya's bright eyes looked at Solo from beneath his lowered brows, from under the haystack of blond hair. Then the agent nodded slowly.
"Like the guards," Illya said.
"Like the guards," Solo said.
"Some kind of hallucination. Something still inside the truck," Illya said.
Solo nodded grimly. "I'd say that was it. Something our shaggy, limping friend tossed in through the air vent."
"It was still inside the truck, and when I came in it got to me, too," Illya said. "I thought I saw Thrush attacking. At least we know why the guards came out firing at nothing. They had some kind of hallucination. Probably that they were being held up."
"That has to be it," Solo agreed. "The question is, why, and how, and just what kind of hallucination?"
Illya said, "But we know one more thing—I saw Thrush agents. Why Thrush? Why particularly did my mind tell me that it was Thrush who was attacking?"
"Maybe we can get that answer back at the Cult headquarters," Solo said.
Illya nodded, looked alertly at Solo. "The limping man, what happened?"
Solo told the small Russian. "So he's probably dead, and that leaves us on a limb. We better get back and see what other leads we can pick up at the Cult."
Illya was about to answer when he stopped, listened. There were low groans outside the truck. Illya motioned, and the two agents leaped down to the highway. The armored truck guards were stirring now. The sirens of the approaching police cars were much closer.
"I think," Illya said, "I would much rather not have to explain this to the police."
"A solid piece of thinking," Solo agreed with a grin.
"I suggest we see what we can salvage at the Cult," Illya went on. "Mr. Waverly will not be pleased if we lose our contact."
"You know, I had the same thought," Solo said. "Shall we depart, fast?"
"I think we shall," Illya said.
The sirens were less than a half mile away as the two agents turned and moved off into the night toward their car parked on the dirt road over the wooded hill.
The guards were beginning to sit up, staring around them. From the factory, as the sirens came close, men were now running down toward the road and the awakening guards.
Illya and Solo vanished soundlessly into the night.
The headquarters of the Things To Come Brotherhood was in a shabby old mansion on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles. As the two agents drove on, the mansion showed no light. Inside the building nothing at all appeared to be moving.
The two agents left their car parked in the shadows and approached the building on foot. There was no one on guard. Illya and Solo moved carefully among the trees and tall weeds of the neglected grounds.
Their informant had alerted them, before they left New York for this mission, that the old mansion and its unkempt grounds had been left tot the Things To Come Brotherhood by an insane, but very wealthy, admirer of the Cult.
Close to the tall, dark old frame building the two agents heard no sounds at all. Among the palms and bird-of-paradise plants they looked significantly at each other. Solo grinned somewhat weakly.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking, my Russian buddy?" Solo said.
"I have a certain suspicion that I am," Illya said drily. "I am afraid we have let them slip quietly through our fingers."
"Mr. Waverly will not be pleased," Solo said.
"That, Napoleon, is the understatement of the year," Illya said. "But I think we had better make sure."
To make sure did not take long. After a careful circling of the house, and finding neither light nor sound, Illya tried the front door and found it open. The mansion, so recently the scene of a meeting of some fifty very odd and shaggy people, was now as bare and silent as some forgotten Egyptian tomb.
"You take the left side. I'll take the right," Solo said.
Ten minutes later the two agents met glumly in the front entrance hall again. The mansion was as bare as looted mummy's tomb.
"They even moved out the red velvet they had draping the speakers lectern," Illya reported. "No chairs, no lectern, no velvet bunting."
"Not even a burned cigarette butt," Solo said. "Our limping friend obviously survived the wreck. He hoodwinked me neatly, in that case."
"And to reach here so much before us he must have been picked up by another car," Illya pointed out.
Solo nodded. "Well, they've taken to the hills. It could take a year to dig them all out."